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iClouds In My Coffee: The Death Of Conversation In Public

The argumentative brawl of the medieval Middle East coffee shop, writes Chloë Starr, has morphed into solo interaction with a screen. (Alex Robert/Unsplash)
The argumentative brawl of the medieval Middle East coffee shop, writes Chloë Starr, has morphed into solo interaction with a screen. (Alex Robert/Unsplash)

I went to a New Haven coffee shop recently to meet someone for a chat. Not exactly a subversive act, you might think. And neither did I, until I noticed the glares from the young man next to us. With his MacBook out, earphones and gum in, I suddenly realized that he believed our conversation transgressed the boundaries of acceptable behavior. To him, the coffee shop was a place to work or browse in solitary isolation. He wasn’t alone in his belief. Table after table bore a silver tablet, and a humanoid staring through the iconic screen into the virtual world. We, the face-to-face talkers, were the aliens.

It wasn’t always like this. But the replacement of physical space by virtual space for social interaction is already revealing its dangers.

Throughout history, coffeehouses have been powerful centers of social interaction. Beginning in Damascus in 1530, coffeehouses spread quickly to Cairo, Baghdad, Istanbul and became centers of intellectual life, where locals would gather to converse, listen to poets and play backgammon or chess. As they spread to other parts of the world, these gathering places continued to be the sites of innovation. The London Stock Exchange was begotten in a coffee house in the late 17th-century; the auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's began as side-attractions in coffee shops; lending libraries circulated from Dublin coffee houses. The communal, the social and even the insubordinate nature of coffee houses is built into the very fabric of their interiors. Or was.

The London Stock Exchange was begotten in a coffee house in the late 17th-century; the auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's began as side-attractions in coffee shops; lending libraries circulated from Dublin coffee houses.

Nowadays, the two- and four-person tables of English tea rooms, that cozy conversational set-up of angled chairs, has ceded to Wagamama-style long trestles for more efficient solo screen interaction. Couches are out, individual cubbies are in, as coffee shops continue to morph away from the “third places” sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified in the late 1980s (spots for community and sociability, outside of domestic space and workspace) into multifunctional sites, for work, online socializing and occasional conversation. Lest we think it’s all Starbucks’ fault, research suggests chain coffee shops, with their trained and friendly baristas, may promote more interaction and have fewer solo workers using coffee tables as office space than the independent shops.

Yes, many of the down-tilted heads across cafés are engaging with their own networks of friends and family. Skype and FaceTime have contracted distance and re-ordered relationships, allowing us to be present across time zones and space boundaries (as once-private spaces, like the bath, host conversations).

Parenting websites are full of advice on limiting the use of electronic screen media as an emotional pacifier or to manage boredom. A 2015 Pew study showed that 24 percent of teens are online “almost constantly,” and the average device time per day for 8- to 18-year-olds had risen to almost 11 hours in the decade to 2009. But it’s not just children. Who has not been out of an evening with friends, chatting away, yet also secretly hoping to get home quickly to return to Netflix? At a dinner party recently, when a Google check was required mid-evening to clarify a point in our conversation, 10 adults around the table took this as a cue they could relax and pull out a phone, check back in, if briefly, to the more magnetic world of our virtual lives.

The minimal-demand, frequent-reward option of online friendship is appealing to all of us. Facebook friendship is low-threat: I like your picture, I’m glad you’re on holiday, I’m amused at your Trump tweet. You do not check me, call me out, argue or raise a wry eyebrow across the table.

Nowadays, the two- and four-person tables of English tea rooms, that cozy conversational set-up of angled chairs, has ceded to Wagamama-style long trestles for more efficient solo screen interaction.

Conversation is much harder. It challenges. We know the back-and-forth of dialogue improves young babies’ language skills, that more passive language acquisition from a television screen is less than ideal, and we are still willing to put the effort in for our children — but not it seems, for ourselves. If the argumentative brawl of the coffee shop in the medieval Middle East or Renaissance Europe no longer hones our collective reasoning, we are now not even having the one-to-one conversations that challenge more gently, or ground us in a broader social horizon over a macchiato. The mere presence of a phone lying on the table or counter can, moreover, detract from the quality of conversation when we do sit down, negatively affecting our closeness and connection. And if we cannot muse on life without distraction with those who care for us, what chance do we have of crossing the political crevasses in the landscape ahead?

William Hazlitt wrote 200 years ago, “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.” It is no wonder that presence, the art (and discipline) of being present to God, oneself and others, is core to spiritual practice across denominations and religions. Listening, being present to the other, is a gift critical to our formation as humans. Lazy self-absorption, and retreat to the no-challenge, self-reinforcing views of our online media circles is not healthy for us or society, as the election aftermath has so destructively reminded us. More desperately, boys who grow up absorbed in the video screen are in danger of becoming men who do not converse. In the United Kingdom now, the single biggest killer of men under 45 is suicide. While little research has been done so far on the gender factors involved, social isolation is implicated.

Should we care about the demise of public spaces for conversation? Yes — if we care about the presence of the living.

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Headshot of Chloë Starr

Chloë Starr Cognoscenti contributor
Chloë Starr, a Public Voices Fellow, is associate professor of Asian Christianity and theology at Yale Divinity School.

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